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Did Ubuntu pack too much newness into the LTS?

Looking back at what I've been through over the past month or so, is it just me, or should Ubuntu's current long-term-support release have been more of a bug-fixed Karmic and less of "this is the first chapter of the new Ubuntu"?

From the social desktop (need much more development) to the enhanced Ubuntu One and all that Desktop Couch stuff (none of which I understand), even the magically moving window buttons, is this a platform that is ready to be used for two or even three years?

I understand that Ubuntu pulled from Debian Testing rather than Sid, but that doesn't affect all the non-Debian extras that Ubuntu bolts on.

So what do you think? Does Ubuntu have the right or wrong idea about what went into this LTS?

Ubuntu is too new too soon too often to be seriously considered as a true enterprise distribution, IMO...Red Hat (as it has been said, RHEL is for those dissatisfied with Debian's rapid releases) is nice and old and moldy (read: stable) and is perfect for situations that need such predictability. Ubuntu would be wise to adopt the Red Hat / Fedora model. Fedora occasionally falls flat and has some bugs, but it's forgiven because it's the testing platform for one of them most stable distros. Debian Sid gets the same pass for the same reason.

10.04 has many bugs and poor compatibilities with some softwares. I know it's newer, I guess what I learned from the trend is wait for version x.10 which will be the bugs-fixed version of x.04.

For me Karmic has been working very well and is the best Ubuntu so far in term of execution. Although Canonical don't officially support PowerPC anymore, even the community version of Karmic PPC works great with my friends 7 years old iBook, Compiz working out of the box, whilst Lynx run extremely slow on the same machine.

I think Canonical did well with 9.10, getting good responses and as result didn't approach 10.04 carefully enough. They made so much design flaws with Lynx:

In Karmic, with Nautilus address bar you can switch between changing location by text or tabs easily. Now you have to do it in gconf-editor. They want to me click click click to navigate anywhere in my harddrive.

Via graphic interface, you used to be able to unmount specific partitions in a removable drive, now you can only eject all partitions at once.

The position of the buttons in 10.04 are not decided due to ease-of-use design, but as a compensation for the artists who designed the Ambience theme using Mac computers without testing the theme extensively on linux desktop. They designed the 'dark oval' surrounding the 3 buttons, the minimize button is in the center and can't be placed on either edges without messing up the visual design. They come up with all kind of philosophical reasons for the button placements in the beginning, but had to compromise and leave the minimize button in the center which is not the position they intended.

I'm happy to know Canonical will replace Firefox with Chromium, I have a feeling Mozilla don't care much about Firefox in linux because it's still performing poorly. From a fresh installation of Lynx, on my Quad-Core computer I get tiny freezes while accessing pages in Firefox.

Heck, something as simple as changing of the Window buttons is something which shouldn't have been done in an LTS release. The other stuff they rolled out (social networking features, et.al.) are way past that. I don't think Canonical really understands what people expect an LTS release to be. They view it as merely support for X number of months. That's not all that people expect from an LTS release. They're also looking for it to be bug free and stable.

Quoting:I don't think Canonical really understands what people expect an LTS release to be. They view it as merely support for X number of months. That's not all that people expect from an LTS release. They're also looking for it to be bug free and stable.

My idea is that you take the last release, roll in as many bug fixes as you can, don't introduce new, untested features, and give the user something that can last two years on the desktop.

What Ubuntu is doing is saying, "This is the LTS, but you should really be running the six-month releases because they'll be better." They're not serious about supporting the LTS like Red Hat is with RHEL.

The way the pace of development has gone for Ubuntu, they should have patched up 9.10 and made that the LTS - or just focus on bugs in 10.04 and make 10.10 the LTS. I can't remember a Ubuntu release that had this many new, untested features and UI changes.

I think this was the right time for Ubuntu to make these moves in the project's overall development, but it's just not the right release for LTS.

After running Lucid Lynx for the last 4 weeks, I've come to the conclusion that LTS stands for Lots of Time Servicing or perhaps Lost Time Surely. The number of Times I've had to Raise Skinny Elephants because the system has locked up for no apparent reason is astounding. I think it might be something to do with X, possibly when I'm running with dual monitors, as the mouse will lock to the top of the screen an sort of bounce up and down and the key board becomes unresponsive to anything other than the Skinny Elephant thing.

I've never seen such an unstable system, not even when running Windows.

> The number of Times I've had to Raise Skinny Elephants because the system has locked up for no apparent reason is astounding.

I've had the same experience. Lucid is on my wife's netbook (Intel graphics) and a desktop (nVidia graphics). I've never seen an OS lock up like this, not even Windows 98. Surprisingly Mint has not locked up at all on the laptop I'm currently typing on.

Yeah, I've been thinking about replacing my system with Mint. I'm sort of stuck at the moment, and have to carry on with Ubuntu, as soon as I've finished a few things and backed up the files again... I'll reinstall with Mint.

That's not the case. We switched over to Mint at The HeliOS Project because Clem at Mint goes in and fixes bugs as well as "features" in Ubuntu. The intel driver mess in previous Ubuntu releases were not an issue in Mint and the dreaded removal of Control alt backspace was put back in it's rightful place in Mint. He goes under the hood and fixes bugs that have been present in Ubuntu for three release cycles. Mint isn't just a cosmetic makeover of Ubuntu...It is an improvement on obvious and not so obvious levels. When you do 300 - 400 installs a year, you don't have time to hand-hold the base install. Mint has pretty much insured we don't have to do that anymore.

@Az, well if Mint doesn't work I'll just have to find something else. At the moment I'm limping along trying to get some documents finished. My system has gone from being rock solid stable to something that makes Vista look desirable. I'm even thinking of rolling back to Jaunty. I'm certain of one thing Lucid NEEDS Long Term Support, because that's what it will take to make it stable.

The interesting thing about when the keyboard freezes and the mouse pointer locks to the top of the screen and bounces, is that there is a huge amount of disk I/O (or so it appears) going on. I've never seen the disk activity light flash so much as it does at those times.

@ Az...If you are running Mint via Ubuntu Repositories, you are using a vastly improved version of Ubuntu....albeit an extremely green vast improvement on Ubuntu.

The fact that Mint runs with Ubuntu repositories isn't the issue. The issue is that in Ubuntu several things are broken and have been broken for over a year...The Mint guys fix the stuff they can and call it Linux Mint when they are finished. I am running them side by side now. The AMD machine is running Mint 9.0, the Intel dual core is running Ubuntu 10.4. The IO activity in Ubuntu, especially when using either Chrome or Firefox is spiking to annoying levels. In mint, it stays between 8 and 15 percent under the same conditions. These are simply measurable observations...not political or religious preferences. If Ubuntu worked better than Mint, I would use that. It makes no difference to me.

@Az, I'm not going with Mandriva, at the moment, because the 64 bit version is only available in Powerpack, and I don't currently have a subscription.

Mint 9, is, so fat, looking good. Unfortunately I restored my personal config files, the ones from Ubuntu 10.04 over the top of the Mint configs, and I ended up with a desktop that looks like Ubuntu 10.04.

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